The Identity Vulnerable Activist and the Emergence of Post-New Left Armed, Underground Organizations in the United States

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The Identity Vulnerable Activist and the Emergence of Post-New Left Armed, Underground Organizations in the United States _*

Gilda Zwerman

Center for Studies of Social Change
September 1995

Introduction

It is 3 pm on April 4 1980. A Budget Rent-A-Car Agency in Evanston, Illinois has just been robbed. A man and a woman leave the scene. Both are armed: the male is carrying a handgun in the waistband of his pants, the female a 38-caliber pistol in her purse. The two hurry toward a switch car that is parked in the south lot of Northwestern University. As they approach the car, there is a sudden yell from behind, "Freeze !" The man attempts to reach for his handgun but he is warned by arresting officers, not to try it. He doesn't.

Days later 11 defendants, including the man and woman arrested in the parking lot, are pushed, dragged or carried bodily into a courtroom in Chicago. They are shouting nationalist slogans and singing the Puerto Rican national anthem. The indictment identified these eleven as members of the Armadas Fuerzas de Liberacion Nationale (F.A.L.N.) They were charged with responsibility for more than one hundred violent incidents including bombings, robberies, and death threats that occurred in the U.S. and on the Island of Puerto Rico, between 1974 and 1980. Bail was set at $2 million each. The defendants demanded to be extradited "back" to Puerto Rico or to be tried as "prisoners of war," given rights stipulated by international law, the Geneva Convention and the United Nations Charter. Their demands were denied. The trial was over in less than two days. Most of the defendants were sentenced to 60 years or more in prison.

It is late afternoon on October 20, 1981. A Brinks armored-truck driver waited while two guards wheeled out bags of money from a bank located in the Nanuet Mall in Nyack, New York. As the money was being transferred, a red van pulled up and three men wearing ski masks jumped out. The first fired an M-16 rifle: one guard was killed instantly another was wounded. A second man fired a sawed-off shotgun at the truck's driver, wounding him, while another black man loitering nearby whipped out a pistol and ran toward the truck. The four grabbed six money bags containing $1.6 million, leaped back into their van and rode off.

At a switch point, the men abandoned their van and piled into the back of a U-Haul truck that was being driven by a man, accompanied by a woman. The money was put into a tan honda driven by a woman. A young college student observed this scene while looking out her living-room window and immediately phoned the police. Minutes later the U-Haul was stopped by Nyack policemen on the on-ramp of the New York State Thruway. The two occupants in the cab of the truck got out. After an unsuccessful attempt to unlock the rear door, police turned their backs and started to walk toward their car. The rear door swung open and six men stormed out firing automatic weapons. Two officers were killed instantly. Chaos erupted as all but one of the occupants scrambled to reach getaway cars or commandeer vehicles on the Thruway. Police chased the suspects but were only able to overtake the Honda. Four people were apprehended and the money was recovered. The rest fled.

At their trial, the defendants claimed that they were "anti-imperialist freedom fighters" who were conducting a "financial expropriation" under the leadership of the Black Liberation Army. The money was going to be used to build a provisional militia to occupy the southern states of Georgia, South Carolina, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, forming a "Republic of New Afrika" where American blacks could live in sovereignty and socialism. Three defendants were sentenced to 75 years to life in prison. One "turned," becoming an informant, and was placed in the Witness Protection Program.

It is September 2, 1984. A small explosion occurs in a building in Long Island City, New York. Near the site, there is a note. It reads: "Tonight armed units of the United Freedom Front bombed offices and facilities of the Motorola Corporation in New York City. This continues our expanded campaign against the US military machine and the death merchants who grow rich from the profits of war production. This action is an expression of solidarity and support for the People of Central America, who are courageously resisting US imperialism in their struggle for Freedom and Self-Determination."

At the time of the bombing, the United Freedom Front was composed of five men, three women and by affiliation, nine children and a dog. For twelve years, UFF members eluded law enforcement officials by wearing wigs, dying their hair, covering facial scars, changing names, falsifying identification documents and moving from one safehouse to another. A slip-up in security led to the arrest of the entire group in November 1984 and December, 1985. The defendants claimed to be "political prisoners" and their "actions" -- the bombing of Motorola and other government and corporate offices in the period between 1981 and 1984 -- part of an "armed struggle" which the eight were waging against U.S. imperialism. Their claims were taken seriously by the Attorney General. They were charged with "seditious conspiracy to overthrow the United States government by force." The women were convicted on lesser charges and sentenced to five to fifteen years in prison. The men are serving prison terms that range from 50 to 160 years.

Terrorism, Agency, and Social Movement Theory

Few social movement scholars have paid attention to the phenomenon of post-New Left terrorism, particularly as it unfolded in the United States. ₁ In part, the reasons for neglect have to do with the characteristics of the phenomenon itself. These groups are very small and they are secret: They claim to represent large constituencies -- even nations-- but there is little evidence of meaningful ties between clandestine groups and the public political arena. They articulate grievances that are unnegotiable and often unintelligible -- even to most radicals. And their engagement in high-risk activism -- illegal activity and violence -- in the absence of a popular insurgent movement raises doubt about the morality as well as the sanity of these protagonists.

However, the view that this subject exists outside the parameters of social movement research is not just about the bizarre characteristics of the phenomenon: it is also about the characteristics of the discipline. Dominated for the last two decades by rationalist and structural frames, specifically resource mobilization and political process theories, social movement researchers have focused primarily on the purposive, legitimate and organizational aspects of protest. Social movements in which structure and strategy are less defining than are the social-psychological dimensions of agency, identity, emotionality, fantasy and symbolism, are not easily interpretable within the dominant frame.

Studies by Tarrow and della Porta (1986), della Porta (1988; 1989; 1990; 1991) and Steinhoff (1989; 1992) represent ground-breaking efforts to "fit" the subject of post New Left terrorism into the dominant frames. Focusing on the escalation of political violence in Italy during the 1970s, Tarrow and della Porta showed (1) that terrorism could be understood in the context of a country's cycle of mass protest (2) that it emerged as a function of the competition between organizations and segments of the social movement sector and (3) that it occurred not as the essence of a period of mass protest, but as a sign of its decline. Later work by della Porta comparing the Italian and West German cases and by Steinhoff on terrorist groups in Japan, further documents the role of the state and right-wing organizations in "stimulating" terrorism on the left, thus establishing a relationship between the "normal" politics of the state and political parties and the "abnormal" politics of small, marginal terrorist organizations.

This body of literature forcefully contests the view of terrorism as an isolated criminal phenomenon and in so doing it stretches the explanatory capacity of the dominant paradigms. Yet, these studies do not escape the limitations of the model: questions concerning agency and irrationality remain suppressed. The subject is represented as an over-socialized, "stumbling actor:" s/he who unwittingly gets involved in situations whose consequences she cannot foresee and has his/her life transformed irrevocably.

Linking post-New Left terrorism to the "new" social movements of the 1970s, theoretical essays by Alberto Melucci (1981; 1988) address the limitations of the rationalist frame. ₂ Foremost, Melucci argues, terrorism must be analyzed as a symptom of broader social pathology: of the distortions and repression inherent in the state's response to the protests in the 1960s; of the tendency toward integralism and totalization that characterize the "old left" sectarian social movements which resurfaced as the New Left declined; and of the narcissistic impulses evident in the identity politics of the new social movements. Lodged between these elements, Melucci argues that post-New Left terrorism is more fruitfully understood as an expressive, largely dramaturgical phenomenon, as opposed to a type of strategic political action. The ideologies, organizations and tactics that typify this form of terrorism are rendered intelligible through the lens of an identity-oriented paradigm (Cohen 1985). Simply put, Melucci's analysis suggests that the primary goal of post-New Left terrorism is not to mobilize a revolution, it is to maintain the collective identity of the protagonists as revolutionaries.

Melucci's concept of collective identity is key to deciphering the "insanity" of terrorism. It explains the group's imperviousness to changing political realities and their escalation of violence and recklessness over time. It also addresses agency and fantasy as relevant components of social movement dynamics at the collective level. But it does not explain why certain individuals -- and not others -- become "vulnerable" to these dynamics. Are there specific characteristics at the individual level that typify those activists -- notably few -- who choose terrorism?

The project of developing an analysis of post-New Left terrorism in the U.S. that focuses on the individual is challenged by a theoretical concern central to the scholarship on social movements in the current period: can the subjective dimensions of social movement participation be addressed without catapulting the discipline back into overly reductionist assumptions that characterized the earlier social psychological models of collective behavior? Since the early 19805, this concern has inspired enormous innovation within the discipline (Mueller and Morris, 1992; Larana, Johnston, and Gusfield, 1994). Extensive attention has been given to the affective and interactive components of social movements (Gamson, 1990; Taylor, 1992). Differential recruitment processes (Snow, 1986; McAdam, 1986), social networks (Klandermans, 1987) and other "micro-structural" variables have proven to be as important to the process of political mobilization as the institutional dynamics emphasized by resource mobilization and p6litical process theories. But again, the shift in focus from macro to micro units does not represent a significant break with either the rationalist or the exclusively sociological orientation of the discipline.

Focus on terrorism and the irrational aspects of militant politics may indeed require some theoretical "backpeddling" -- a rethinking of the insights offered by the early models of collective behavior and reconsiaeration of the impact which unconscious, pre-existing states in the individual may have on the dynamics of protest movements. At the same time, it is worth noting that psychology and more specifically psychoanalytic theory has progressed considerably since the period when political and social theorists like Lasswell (1962) and Toch (1965) essentially used a single text, Freud's GROUP PSYCHOLOGY AND THE ANALYSIS OF THE EGO (1921), as the basis for interpreting the psychological (read: pathological) dynamics of collective action.

Currently however, there is a small circle of sociologists-turned-psychoanalytic scholar/clinicians including Chodorow (1978) and Benjamin (1988), who were directly influenced by the emancipatory ideals of the New Left and Feminist movements, and have infused their critical, if not explicitly Marxist, views of mainstream institutions into the canon of psychoanalysis. In contrast to classical Freudian "drive theory" which views the internal life of the individual as determined by instincts, these writers stress the intersubjective nature of the individual and the importance of "object relations," interaction, culture and social structure in shaping the psyche. ₃ They further recognize that to the extent the dominant institutions in which the individual develops and interacts are exploitative and repressive, they -- the institutions -- play a role in creating or accentuating pathology in the individual. This literature provides a useful lens for understanding the development of irrational and destructive relations without relying on normative assumptions of deviance and pathology.

Using an interpretive frame which combines elements of modern psychoanalytic theory and contemporary social movement theory, this narrative re-opens what most researchers regard as the final chapter of the American New Left. It focuses on the progenies of Black, white, and Puerto Rican insurgent organizations which formed during the peak of the protest cycle in the late 1960s and sustained their commitment to "armed struggle" through the 1980s when most were arrested, tried and imprisoned on charges of armed robbery, bombings, murder felony sedition and conspiracy to overthrow the United States government by force.

Although the emphasis of this paper is analytical, it is based on primary data sources which include interviews conducted in 1986-88 and 1991 with eighteen women, most of whom are currently incarcerated in state and federal prisons; interviews with key informants involved in Black, white and Puerto Rican networks that support "armed struggle" inside the United States; and documentation of media and government responses on the legislative and judicial levels to these groups. ₄ For heuristic purposes, the protagonists are analyzed as part of a single tendency despite racial and secondary ideological differences.

Terrorism and Identity Vulnerability

Consistent with the work of Tarrow and della Porta, della Porta, Steinhoff, and Melucci, the emergence of post-New Left terrorism is viewed as a social and largely structural process, involving the recession of social movements, the repressive apparatus of the state and the restriction of political opportunity. However, its distinction lies in the articulation of a narrative about New Left decline which emphasizes the connections between structural forces and the subjective reality of the individual.

Central to the analysis is the identification of a specific type of social movement protagonist. I refer to her as the "identity vulnerable activist," for whom involvement in protest politics can become an exceedingly "charged," all-consuming, and in the extreme, self-destructive activity. This level of involvement is indicative of an unconscious attempt on the part of this individual to use the social movement arena in a compensatory manner, as a means for getting unrequited emotional needs --related to self-esteem, autonomy and authenticity -- met.

Identity vulnerability is not an aberrational, pathological or even an uncommon subjective state, especially among adolescents and young adults. It has no intrinsic connection to violence or terrorism. Rather, the problem is one of intensity and the displacement of early developmental needs onto the unpredictable, often volatile arena of protest politics.

The pervasiveness of identity vulnerable individuals in social movements -- as opposed to institutional settings -- is due to a myriad of factors: social movements tend to attract youth; they are sites of impassioned activity; they hold out possibilities on a personal level for finding, or alternatively, losing, oneself; and the formal mechanisms of constraint on the individual are relatively weak in so far as organizations within this sector can so easily change, factionalize, fade, or in the short span of one meeting, abruptly dissolve.

Moreover, social movements are dependent on and often exploitative of the identity-vulnerable activist. During the ascending phase in a cycle of protest, she is likely to be one of the movers and shakers, the one who gives more, and takes risks when no one else will take them. If the movement is successful, she may be among the heroines. Certainly social movement participation can play a constructive role in the emotional development of a vulnerable individual. But if the movement fails or ends in disappointment, the identity vulnerable activist is likely to remain overinvested. She continues to stay late, though there is little left to do and few others left to do it with.

From this point on her behavior is at once willful and overdetermined. On the one hand, her commitment and tenacity in the face of a receding movement provides a license to impose her personal needs on the (few) others who remain or who joined the movement "late." These needs become inexorably fused with a compatible political ideology. and elevated to the realm of principle. On the other hand, she is unable to recognize that her impulses and desires come from within. While others may see her as a leader, she experiences herself as a compliant subject, accepting direction and control from powerful or idealized others.

Thus, despite her growing potency in an increasingly small, isolated political orbit, she is ever more "vulnerable" to the political dynamics outside that orbit. That is, she becomes entirely subjective and therefore incapable of interpreting and responding efficaciously to new political realities and constraints. Most significantly, she is unable to assess the dangers presented by those agents -- in the F.B.I., U.S. Marshalls, Joint Terrorist Task Force and the like -- which seek to discredit and destroy the movement. Rather, as the movement recedes, she becomes attached to these forces, as a primary source identity affirmation and recognition.

The emergence of post-New Left terrorism may be most fruitfully understood in terms of corresponding disintegrative trajectories which unfold at the structural and psychological levels. The correspondence exists between the disintegration of the social movement, a process in which the state is the key protagonist and the disintegration of the ego, a process that is internal to the activist. Although the identity vulnerable activist may elude her captors for many years, she is "arrested" long before she is imprisoned, at a moment of social movement decline in which radical politics, emotional need, and repression collide.

II. New Left Insurgency: Elasticizing the Borders of the Third World

Katsiaficas (1987) noted that one characteristic which made the New Left "new," was its break with the traditional, class based model of social change. Groups normally considered marginal to large-scale social movements -- students, young people, racial minorities, women and elements in the underclass -- presented the most incisive challenges to the existing social order.

Throughout the 1960s, these groups formed constituency-based organizations that sought to enlarge their rights and freedoms within a broader consciousness of social justice for all. The mobilization against the Vietnam War galvanized these groups and gave them a sense of participating in a movement that had a national as well as global character. Many activists expected there would be an organic progression from anti-war mobilization to total social transformation.

While opposition to the War intensified, the movement did not unify as predicted. Social movement organizations that had achieved prominence in the early and mid-sixties including the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Conference (SNCC), Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and Mobilization Committee to End the War (MOBE), ultimately proved incapable of nurturing the participation of a "layered" constituency, a mass base which was multi-racial and represented varying degrees of consciousness and availability for political commitment (Dellinger,1975; Miller, 1983; Oberschall, 1978). Moreover, activists became frustrated by their inability to assess the impact of anti-War protests on foreign policy, as executives in both the Johnson and Nixon Administrations consciously employed the "deaf ear" tactic in order to discourage the opposition (Gitlin, 1980). Most researchers of the New Left agree that when the Tet Offensive was launched in 1968 and U.S. involvement in Vietnam escalated, the movement had reached a critical impasse. The "moment of reform," chroniclers of the period observed, "was evaporating."

"The longer the War went on," noted Gitlin, "the less it looked like an accident, the more like a symptom." The argument that the war was just one (of many) consequences of a larger system -- American imperialism -- gained repute. Through this lens, as Sale (1973:458) described it, what was once construed as evil in America (racism, militarism, capitalism, etc.) -- alterable through reform -- was now viewed as the evil of America -- a "monster" that had to be completely destroyed.

A member of SDS from 1965-1969, emphasized the significance of "discovering" imperialism in her political evolution.

We came to recognize that issues which once seemed separate had a relationship to one another. Imperialism was a whole system. This was a tremendous political breakthrough -- it made sense of the world and our own experience. The same school which tracked students by sex, race and class into the appropriate niche, turned out to own slums in the Black community and to develop anti-personnel weapons and strategies against (Third World) revolution.

Conceived as a unitary, driving and defining force, the focus on imperialism levelled the terrain of political dissent. There was one enemy, one War, one opposition and two battle zones, in Vietnam and in the U.S. Using this frame to interpret the distant, yet compelling, images of U.S. military personnel slaughtering soldiers as well as civilians during Tet, activists prodded each other toward a new militancy with the question -- "Are we doing our absolute best for the Vietnamese ?" (Gitlin, 1987: 285).

In many respects, the answer to that question, rhetorical though it might have been, formed a cutting edge that distinguished the "anti-imperialist insurgents." In the late 1960s, they could be recognized among those who abandoned community-based and constituency-based projects in order to pursue links -- however conceptual -- between themselves and the National Liberation Front (NLF) in Vietnam. They raised the NLF flag at anti-War demonstrations; they made pilgrimages to Cuba and Vietnam; they attended international youth conferences, meeting with representatives from Third World revolutionary movements; they read the work of revolutionary nationalists Franz Fanon, Che Guevarra, and Regis Debray; they glorified America's enemies, the leaders of the NLF -- Ho Chi Minh, Madame Bihn and Lin Piao -- as godparents of a new insurgency movement; and they watched the BATTLE OF ALGIERS over and over.

By 1969, the accoutrements of the urban guerrilla and images of white radicals training in the use of firearms circulated throughout the movement, though as Gitlin (1980:181) observed, "the imagery was considerably more widespread than the practice." Among Black and Puerto Rican activists, however, making connections between oppressed colonies in the Third World and their own experience of oppression in urban ghettos did not require too much imagination. Nor was the anti-imperialist frame a new discovery. Prior to and independent of the New Left, an array of Black and Puerto Rican radical organizations including the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), Organization for African American Unity (OAAU), the Republic of New Africa (RNA), the Movimiento Por Independencia Puertoriqueno (MPIPR), Puerto Rican Nationalist and Independence Parties (PNP/PIP) and Puerto Rican Socialist Party (PSP PR/US), had articulated political themes consistent with the anti-imperialist frame. They had stressed the immutability of racism in America, the necessity of self-rule, the right of an independence movement to bear arms, and the importance of building ties with national liberation movements in the Third World, especially with Cuba. Many of these groups had spawned icons --like Malcolm X, Robert Williams, Obedele Imari, Juan Corretjer, Albizu Campos -- who had confronted the state with acts of revolutionary violence, sacrificing their freedom or their lives.

Gradually, and with much improvisation, Black and Puerto Rican radicals of the New Left infused elements of these legacies into constituency-based organizations. This retrieval provided both justification and a sense of authenticity to the shift from civil rights advocacy and anti-war protest to insurgency. Leaders of the new insurgent groups including the Black Panther Party in California and New York, Black Student Associations, a lesser-known militant group calling itself United Slaves (US), the Young Lords Party in New York and Chicago, the Chicano Brown Berets in California and the American Indian Movement in Minnesota came to view themselves as the progenies of nationalist and tribal traditions. In this context, revolutionary anti-imperialism offered a way for politics to subsume geography and for the borders of the Third World to be "stretched" in order to include all indigenous racial minorities within the U.S.

Impressed by this rhetoric, white insurgents easily slipped into a stance of "hyper-reverence" toward insurgents of color. The power line of Third Worldism created a current that ran from Vietnam to Cuba to Latin America to Puerto Rico to Harlem to Columbia University.

The ascent of an indigenous "Third World," especially Black, leadership toward the end of the 1960s was accompanied by a dramatic rise in incidents of political violence. Typically, these "actions" were precipitated by specific campus-based conflicts --between students and administrators or between university interests and the needs of surrounding communities. But again, the anti-imperialist frame permitted insurgents to inflate the significance of the event by construing it as an expression of "solidarity" with Third World liberation.

Although anti-imperialism was only one -- among several --competing ideological frames shaping the movement, the flamboyant and combative style of its adherents captured center stage in this critical period. Until the emergence of insurgency, attention to peaceful anti-War demonstrations from the mainstream media had been minimal and the daily grind of community-based activism did not qualify as news at all, but violence made headlines, and not just in the newspaper. "The Establishment," wrote Sale (1973:459) referring to conservative and right-wing constituencies in Congress and business, "seized upon the bold proclamations of revolution and the tentative acting out of those proclamations...as excuses to increase their powers of control and repression." While it would soon became apparent that the escalation of repression had unforeseen and monumentally disastrous consequences for the movement, its effect on the insurgents was more seductive than daunting: getting defined as a threat had at least broken through the barrier of invisibility. Insurgents were also affirmed by a handful of patrons in cultural and intellectual circles who were titillated by violence and generously, if mindlessly, donated resources to this militant edge. When the youngest cohort of the baby boom generation entered college in 1969, many leaped from the constraints of home and high school directly to sites of militancy they had seen on T.V., momentarily swelling the ranks of these groups. And finally, as former Vietnam veterans appeared in increasing numbers at anti-War demonstrations and word of protests within the military itself reached the movement, the fuel gage of insurgency read "full."

When more cautious and seasoned activists attempted to point out what they perceived as the political and strategic weaknesses of revolutionary anti-imperialism -- the application of a model of revolution derived from rural peasant movements to urban industrial societies, the demand for a full-time commitment to revolution, the political subQrdination of white radicals to Third World leadership and the provocation of repression -- a few paid attention and a second trajectory emerged from the frame. These activists recognized that their relationship to imperialism -- as Americans, as students, even as oppressed minorities within the U.S. -- was vastly different from that of colonized peoples; that their "white skin privileges" could be used as a resource. Throughout the 1970s, these activists organized "solidarity" committees for the purpose of providing material aid to specific national liberation movements in Africa, Latin American and Central America.

Alternatively, the anti-imperialist insurgents searched for a way to "breakthrough" the structural and cultural differences between a leftist resistance movement in the U.S. and a nationalist guerrilla movement in the Third World; to divest themselves of the privileges and resources they had; and to embody the rage and powerlessness of "the other." The emphasis on "breakthrough" became a significant element on the trajectory toward terrorism, as it shifted the focus from political strategy to personal identity: revolution, these insurgents concluded, would not be achieved through the mobilization of a mass revolutionary movement, but through an act of individual will. Amplified within the context of an ideYltity-oriented paradigm, the anti-imperialist frame gained back in fantasy what it lost in precision.

By the end of 1969, these insurgents had reached the limits of dramaturgy and rhetoric. A faction of SDS calling itself Weatherman openly dedicated itself to revolutionary violence; within the Young Lords and the Puerto Rican Socialist Parties debate about nationalism and "armed struggle" came to the fore; a new incarnation of the Black Panthers focusing on "armed self-defense" had emerged; a merger between the American Indian Movement and an ad hoc group, Indians of All Tribes, in San Francisco, prepared themselves for a stand-off with the National Guard during the occupation of Alcatraz Island; and a handful of what Gitlin refers to as "free-lance bombing groups" such as the New Year's Gang in Madison, Wisconsin, the Red Family in California, and Mad Dog in New York, began planning "local" guerrilla actions. While there were no formal organizational ties between these groups, they were linked by the tenets of the frame: an adherence to the "one war" theory of imperialism; deference to a Third World vanguard; and a belief that violence was the necessary centerpiece of a "serious" revolutionary movement.

As the violence escalated, the gulf between these insurgents and the mainstay of the movement widened. Almost everyone outside the frame sensed that these protagonists were on a path which, if taken to its "logical" endpoint, would profoundly separate their futures from that of their contemporaries. They displayed an uncanny readiness to take risks, to respond impulsively when provoked, to over-identify with oppressed "others" and act on their behalf, to square off with authorities and police, and to behave disparagingly toward activists who dared to criticize them.

In the aftermath of yet another escalation of the War, the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, and the killing of students at Kent State and Jackson State Universities by National Guardsmen, the events of May 1970 marked the peak of New Left activity. The overall mood of the movement was militant, but the anti-imperialist insurgents were already on the periphery of this wave of mobilization: they now refused to work within a mass movement that remained committed to reformist and pacifist strategies.

Although attendance at anti-War demonstrations increased through 1972, by Fall, 1970, the movement had turned, almost imperceptibly, toward decline. Diverse explanations of New Left decline agree that insurgency was integrally related to the movement's collapse. Evans (1983) points out that the use of violence by the Left in the United States has always resulted in a loss of popular sympathy, primarily due to the public's associations of political violence with state-sanctioned tactics and right-wing campaigns. McAdam (1982) correlates the tactical shift toward violence with the insurgents' abandonment of specific, negotiable goals which, in turn, diminished their access to resources and support from political parties and elites. Both Dellinger (1974;139) and Katsiaficas view the insurgent tendency as a seductive "trap" into which some of the finest and most capable activists were lured. By all accounts, insurgency had failed: the revolution, especially a violent one, was structurally not possible.

III. New Left Decline, Sectarianism and the Identity Vulnerable Activist

Scholars who have studied the aftermath of dramatic periods of social turmoil, note that the emergence of millenarian, religious and chihaist sects are a common occurrence (Festinger, 1956; Kanter, 1972; O'Toole, 1975). The ranks of these small, fringe groups are swelled precisely with those who are unable to recognize that a significant historical moment has passed. zolberg (1972) accounts for this phenomenon in terms of the nature of the turmoil itself which, he claims, generates a form of madness. In such "moments of madness," zolberg explains, high investments of time, commitment and risk are made; the world is divided simply into allies and enemies; history is in the making; and all seems possible. Relationships among the participants seem as though they have been cemented "for life."

Invariably, expectations far exceed outcome: moments of madness, zolberg (1972:207) continues, "generally do not collapse the distance between the present and future, as those who experience them yearn to do." In an individual economy of finite time and energy, such disappointments will typically result in a deflation of the ideologies and organizations that created the moment as well as the "exit" by many from the realm of political life altogether (Hirshman 198.3). Organizations and movement networks dissolve; participants scatter; relationships among "comrades" which seemed cemented for life may fade along with the moment.

However, as social order and quiescence are gradually restored, there are those -- the "zealot," "fanatic" or "true believer" -- who remain addicted to the moment (Hoffer, 1951; Rudin, 1969). Although they too have only limited energies, they will "overspend" rather than succumb to disappointment. While most others in their orbit are exhausted, dispirited, scared and confused, they are psychically prepared to force the impossible.

Thus, it is only in the aftermath -- the defeat of the revolution -- that the aberrance of the identity vulnerable activist is revealed: she is, to use a term elaborated by political theorist Albert Hirschman (1983), the activist who is unable to "shift involvements." The distinction between this activist and many of the sixties generation who sought to sustain their radical commitments or reactivate the movement throughout the early 1970s (Whalen and Flacks, 1990) lies in the "morbid" and fantastical nature of her attachments: to ideologies, organizations or organizational factions that are no longer relevant or realistic in relation to the current political context. One respondent recalled the period when the insurgent group to which she belonged (since 1969) broke-up:

Everyone was walking around in a state of shell-shock.. .But you know, horrible as that time was, I could not foresee reinventing an identity for myself outside the context of a revolutionary movement. I didn't see any alternative I believed in. Many people had already stopped being active or said they wanted to check out doing other kinds of (non-revolutionary) political work. To me it looked like that choice led to becoming "yuppies," professionals and arm-chair intellectuals.
So I started mending fences with comrades inside (prison) and from another (insurgent) organization. Very gradually, almost individual by individual, we began to regroup and make plans forrecruitment of new blood. We bought guns. At the time it felt new and positive. Now I'm starting to think that we had merely recreated the same type of arrangement as before.

Another respondent discusses the period of chaos in 1969-70 when the Black Panthers Party had split into two warring factions and most of its members "just split, period."

I called my mother on the phone very hysterical, crying. I told her I wanted to come home, to bring my children into safety. The family was very supportive. I stayed with them for a few months.
I guess I just needed a break because soon I became restless. I missed the excitement of being involved. So, just like that I quit my job and told my Mama that I was leaving. So I took my children and headed back and made connections with the (revolutionary) forces.

Significantly however, only a small number of identity vulnerable activists became terrorists. Rather, by 1971, most had "switched" trajectories, rejecting revolutionary anti-imperialism in favor of a more orthodox, "old Left," Marxist, Trotskyist or Maoist-based ideological frame (Fields, 1988). For instance, when the Young Lords Party dissolved in 1970, most of its members regrouped and formed the Maoist-oriented Puerto Rican Revolutionary Organization (PRO) or rejoined the Puerto Rican Socialist Party. Similarly, by 1970, large segments of the Black Panther Party were recruited by Marxist-Leninist groups including the Communist Party/USA and Revolutionary Workers League. Both the Communist Party and Young Socialist Alliance recruited a sizeable number of members from the Brown Berets.

These small, sectarian, revivalist groups appealed to identity vulnerable activists in several ways. They permitted members to sustain an identity as a revolutionary; they provided the totalistic lifestyle of a disciplined cadre organization; and they espoused a class-based or mass-based cognitive frame which had the capacity to explain why the marginal constituencies of the New Left had not been able make a social revolution on their own. But however morbid the belief systems of sectarian organizations were, these groups generally steered away from violence, thus in an ironic way, routinizing or conventionalizing the career of the post-New Left revolutionary and taking it out of the realm of a life-threatening activity.

Those who remained tied to a revolutionary anti-imperialist organization after 1970, however, were the most vulnerable of all. Their commitment to violence, to "breakthrough" to national liberation movements in the Third World and to reclaiming racially-based nationalist and tribal traditions, generated a degree of panic and paranoia on the part of the state that far outsized the actual threat posed by these tiny, marginal, groups. By over-reacting, the state drew the identity vulnerable activist into a darkly symbiotic attachment to itself. As this interdependent relation evolved, distinctions between radical and criminal, and compliance and resistance eroded. ₅

IV. Engaged to the State

Since the passage of the Freedom of Information Act in 1979, researchers have acquired a considerable amount of documentation concerning the federal government's Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) directed at the New Left in the period between 1969 and 1974. Measures included aggressive forms of intelligence gathering through electronic and physical surveillance, infiltration, breaking into offices and ransacking of organizational files; disruption of organizations using agent provocateurs and disinformation campaigns; criminal frame-ups of key activists and wide-net distribution of grand jury subpoenas; and use of courtroom trials as forums in which activists were publicly degraded (Antonio, 1971; Donner, 1980; Zwerman, 1989).

Since many COINTELPRO documents still have not been made available, and many of those that are available have been deleted of information or reclassified as "top secret," researchers are probably accurate when they suggest that the impact of repression on the New Left, especially Black insurgent groups, remains grossly underestimated. Consequently, contemporary social movement scholars are paying more attention to repression and viewing it as an external, independent variable in causal explanations of New Left decline (Marx 1973).

Within just one year of its inception, the invisible hand of COINTELPRO had played a decisive role in moving insurgents from the community and the campus into the criminal justice system. As Marx (1979) and McAdam (1982) note, this tactic had obvious low cost advantages to authorities. It imposed programmatic constraints on insurgent organizations by putting them on the defensive and forcing them to pour their human and financial resources into legal battles. It created a climate of suspicion and distrust. Insurgents went from being comrades to being co-defendants, as the state to drew the line that separated these defendants from "legitimate" protesters.

Between 1970-73, the daily life of the anti-imperialist insurgent took place in a kind of extraordinary "half-world" of indictments, surveillance, trials, defense committees, convictions, prison sentences, and appeals. The trials of the Black Panthers in New York and New Haven in 1970-71 and the 71-day stand-off between federal agents and members of the American Indian Movement at Wounded Knee in 1973 stand out as the most significant events. Even a low-intensity involvement with the trials -- going to court or visiting a defendant in jail -- drew the insurgent in this world in which mental stress, physical discomfort, exhaustion and fear were "normal" states of being. Former Black Panther Elaine Brown writes in her autobiography (1992:146):

The dissociation, the separation from everything, the feeling of being disembodied began to be part of my nights. I sold Panther Newspapers in the evenings and worked during the day and read what I was supposed to read. But whatever ideals, values or passion I once had were being buried by the bitterness, between layers of defense and layers of fear. It had something to do with fear, I thought, consumed by it as I was."

At the same time and not withstanding the government's plan to destroy the New Left, many scholars and observers have argued that the anti-imperialist insurgents were unnecessarily provocative and that the protagonists had to have "known" from the past experiences of radical movements, that the rhetoric and tactics they employed, would invariably lead to intensification of repression (Oberschall, 1978; Gitlin, 1987). How is it that this critical awareness is hidden from their consciousness ? How is it that for the next ten or more years these insurgents continue to force the impossible and appear utterly determined to wind up in prison. And "why," as cultural theorist Umberto Eco (1986) asks of the post-New Left terrorists in Italy, "are they laughing in those cages ?"

Initially, the identity vulnerable activist used the social movement as a way to master her longings for authenticity and self-esteem. Had the establishment recognized the protesters as viable and valuable social agents, involvement in the movement might have served a constructive or reparative purpose. Instead, their efforts to reform the system were thwarted and the "madness" of insurgency ensued.

The ideological tenets of revolutionary anti-imperialism, a specific version of insurgency, had an appeal to the identity-vulnerable activist that went beyond politics: it assuaged her own emptiness by permitting her to "lend" herself out to aggrieved and powerless "others," "nations," or "people" and to construe her actions as determined by their needs. Thus, the possibility for achieving authenticity was bound to the salvation of an abstract, distant "other." To this end, the more risks she took, the more she sacrificed, the more empowered she felt.

The attention that the anti-imperialist insurgents' theatrics received from the media as well as segments of the movement -- the many who applauded but did not participate -- was, at least momentarily, reinforcing. But the thrill was short lived. After the intense but short Spring of 1970, the applause abruptly faded. Unfortunately, this sequela reflected little understanding on the part of elders and patrons in the movement about the psychological impact that participation in high-risk actions or "moments of madness" can have on young, vulnerable activists. Seduced then abandoned, the internal state of emptiness, chaos and anxiety within the identity vulnerable activist was further aggravated. The problem of external recognition -- an audience -- remained paramount.

The intrusion of the state into this dynamic was the decisive factor contributing to the degeneration of the identity-vulnerable activist: it represented a source of recognition through violation. It has already been suggested that even in the nascent stage of insurgency, punitive responses from the state were experienced by these protagonists as an affirmation of their revolutionary identity. The "wounds" inflicted on the insurgents -- by police violence, FBI harassment, subpoenas, indictments or a jail sentence -- were worn proudly as credentials, the sign of having struck at the monster.

1. Politicizing the Criminal

The state's use of illegal means to disrupt and infiltrate protest organizations had blurred the distinction between actions that were indeed criminal and those that were political. Thus every indictment, every subpoena and every prison sentence the state issued was suspect. In this climate, simple acts of banditry or vengeful murder which perpetrators punctuated with a clenched fist drew insurgents clamoring into the courtroom pledging their support.

Adding to the confusion was the increasing influence of non-movement-based constituencies within insurgency groups --former prisoners and military veterans from working-class backgrounds who had been radicalized either indirectly through exposure to revolutionary literature or more likely through personal contact with an insurgent. The inmate rebellion against the living conditions at Attica Prison involving two high profile New Left insurgents, George Jackson and Sam Melville, represented a watershed event in relation to this recruitment pattern. Although the event resulted in numerous casualties and ultimately more repression, it also demonstrated the convicts' potential for disciplined behavior, collective solidarity and an ability to understand their criminality in the context of economic oppression and racial injustice. One respondent reflects on the period when prisons and other non-political spheres were mined for new recruits:

Our tendency in the movement was like a boat leaving the shore. As the boat was edging off, different kinds of people got on. Prisoners got on, ex-cons got on, veterans who had done some pretty dicey things in Vietnam, their girlfriends, young runaways,Muslims. But the question that never actually ever got answered was: who's going to steer the boat ? These comrades became revolutionaries through their life experiences. It made them hate the system and hate the state. We thought their consciousness was higher than someone who developed through activism or theory. We even started thinking that doing time (in jail) should be a requirement for becoming a revolutionary.

The recruitment of non-movement-based constituencies provided insurgents with an "authentic" connection to the masses and a much-needed infusion of new blood and energy. However, they also represented a kind of moral "wildcard," as they lacked the socialization that most insurgents had received as movement activists, as college students, and as members of middle-class families. The latter feature served alternately as asset and liability: on the one hand, the non-movement-based recruits' previous experience as criminals and soldiers enabled the group to engage in more quixotic actions and to escalate the level of violence.

Once, at a meeting where plans for an action were being made, someone had actually proposed what I thought was a major change in the group's strategy: from 'defend yourself, if necessary' to 'don't wait, shoot first.' All the other men agreed. For one second there, the women glanced around at each other. But we said nothing. Nothing ! I know I was really freaked out by this.
Question: Why didn't you say something ?
Answer: Because I really couldn't imagine myself shooting at all. And frankly, I didn't think I would have to, given where I positioned myself. And then I thought, 'maybe one of them (the men) would end up in a fire fight and who am I to decide this for them ?

Simply put, these men were able to do things that insurgents had neither the skill nor courage (read: stomach) to do; on the other hand, some of these actions, either in the planning or the execution, crossed ethical lines which insurgents, even at this stage of degeneration, were hesitant to cross, creating more tension within the group, more isolation from the receding New Left milieu, more indictments, more subpoenas, more surveillance, more arrests, and more visits to jail.

There was a time when there were a lot of conflicts, a lot of killings going on. Banks were being robbed. People around me were dying or going to jail The very thing we said we were struggling against we seemed to become the victims of that very same system.

As the line between radical and criminal faded, opportunities for political mobilization were closed off. Ideological principles were superseded by a broad emotive-action frame: anyone who hated the state and was willing to do something about it can join the struggle. ₆ The violence became more reckless and less comprehensible politically. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how an action such as an "armed expropriation" of a House 0' Weenies, a meat packing plant in the South Bronx, was justified in ideological terms.

The strategies for revolution and living as a revolutionary had become inextricably linked to strategies for surviving the repression. Significantly however, the central feature of their strategy was not violence -- although violence was certainly a feature. Rather, the indispensable, maintaining element of the project was secrecy: hiding their identity and intentions from the public or in some cases, disappearing from public political life altogether.

2. The Life Below the Ground

Initially, clandestinity was considered to be a defensive tactic, a way to avoid indictment, arrest and imprisonment. One of the most infamous "disappearing acts" associated with the New Left occurred in 1970 at the site of an explosion in the basement of a New York City townhouse. Three people were killed instantly. As a crowd of neighbors and passersby congregated in front of the burning rubble, the survivors, recognized as two women belonging to the Weatherman, were sighted running naked from the house. They were not seen or heard from for years to come.

As the constituency of fugitives enlarged and as insurgents became more aware of COINTELPRO operations, clandestinity was increasingly conceptualized in pro-active terms. Following the foco theory of revolution used by guerrilla movements in Latin America, insurgents advocated the need to build clandestine networks as a requisite for waging war against the imperialist state. One respondent discussed her decision to go underground. She had become romantically involved with V., a man who had been radicalized in Vietnam and in prison. In the course of their relationship, he became a fugitive.

I went under for a combination of reasons. Politically, I was committed to the idea of the underground. I thought it was necessary. We needed to build an infrastructure that revolutionaries could live in, survive, and resist. Personally, I really wanted to be' with V. It would have been very hard for me to leave him then. But its not like I went underground for V. I was too defined before I hooked up with V. for the decision to be something against who I really was. The experiences I had had (referring to instances of F.B.I. surveillance and a rape of a comrade by an undercover agent) made me believe that we weren't going to survive any other way. If we believed in armed struggle then we had to build something that would last.

From 1970 on, not only did individuals disappear but the remaining fragments of insurgent organizations regrouped as secret formations. These collectives consisted of fugitives -- those who were on the lam and did virtually nothing political in their daily lives -- and non-fugitives, those who commuted between the public and the clandestine realms, devoting most of their energy to supporting the fugitives living below.

Within the underground, the requisites of security took precedence over all other realms of activity as well as all ethical considerations. To this end, hiding, misrepresentation and deception were integrated into the organizational and personal lives of the insurgents, creating extraordinary conditions for impression management both within the group and in the external world (Herdt, 1990; Zwerman, 1994). Protagonists took identities that did not belong to them; they gave out addresses where they did not live; they espoused views which they did not hold; and they committed acts for which they were not responsible. A non-fugitive member of an underground group explained the dynamic between the individual and the collective in this way:

In the abstract, I felt completely accountable, to the leadership, to the fugitives underground, to prisoners. But when it came right down to it, I did whatever I wanted to do. Some people knew something about some of my activities some of the time. Never the same people, never the same things. I'd lie a little here and lie a little there and rationalize all the secrets and dishonesty on the grounds that we needed to maintain security. Sometimes I wasn't even sure who exactly the "we" was.

In relation to the state, clandestinity was perhaps more provocative and engaging than the violence itself. In the course of the decade, approximately 20 underground groups had formed (primarily as a result of organizational recycling) and approximately 150 violent acts -- a notably small number over a ten year period -- were attributed to these formations. Moreover, the actions were fairly unsophisticated: they did not demonstrate extensive planning, technical knowledge or personnel. This low-level of activity was, of course, a result of the directionlessness and diminishing resources of the group. But since the group was invisible, the state relied on its own fantasies to fill the void. For instance in early February, 1972 when the FBI was searching for three members of the Black Liberation Army in connection with the murder of two police officers on the lower East Side, the group was characterized as a "shadowy outgrowth of a split in the Black Panther Party," "larger than initially suspected," "well-disciplined, decentralized structure of relatively autonomous guerrilla units" and "is able to find assistance in housing, food, identification and weapons in Black urban ghettos from end of the country to the other." At the time, the three suspects had constituted approximately one half of the BLA's entire membership.

On a psychological level, clandestinity represented a transgressional space where the border separating reality and fantasy dissolved and the search for an authentic self was suspended. By disappearing or alternately by splitting one's identity into pieces, the individual transferred her agency to the group; the group transferred its agency to the revolution; and the revolution did not exist.

The half-world into which the state had drawn insurgents in 1969-70, had by 1973-74, become their whole world. On the one hand, COINTELPRO had effectively reduced public political space to a narrow, well-trafficked corridor in which a mixed-based constituency of radicals and criminals shuttled in and out of clandestinity, to and from meals and meetings in tiny collectives, target practice, armed actions, court, and prison. On the other hand, the draconian character of the repression and the secrecy surrounding their activities infused great meaning into this restrictive existence. The insurgents called it "armed struggle." And the state called it "terrorism."

Ironically, the term "terrorism" itself, as the state applied it to insurgency groups, provided a context where -- otherwise there would have been none. It implied that this tiny, nomadic fringe of sixties radicalism constituted a substantial threat to the nation's internal security; that they possessed the potential to (re) mobilize a mass movement; and that they received training and support from international guerrilla movements. This list of accusations was as close as these insurgents would ever come to fulfilling their political aspirations.

Conclusion

Focusing on an extremely small, obscure and idiosyncratic phenomenon in U.S. social movement history, this paper introduces the concept of the identity-vulnerable activist: the protagonist who throws herself into the movement, over-identifies with the most oppressed elements, lends herself to the highest risk actions and cannot abate her fervor when the movement recedes.

The stakes of integrating this concept into social movement theory are high. First, it explicitly links the element of agency to an intra-psychic conflict within the individual. Second, it challenges the conception of the "rational actor" which underlies the dominant paradigm of the discipline.

As the identity vulnerable activist moves through this narrative about New Left decline, a new formulation of agency emerges. ₇ Foremost, the notion of identity vulnerability rests on the assumption of an authentic self: a core or essence of the human condition, implicit in most enlightenment-based, emancipatory theories, including psychoanalysis, existentialism and socialism, which view the individual as striving for an optimal state of being goodness, health, autonomy or freedom -- that is achievable at no expense to an other. Within the psychoanalytic frame, an individual's prospect for authenticity is linked to her mastery of a specific developmental task, referred to by clinicians as "separation-individuation." Beginning in infancy, this task involves the ability to recognize both her dependence on and relative autonomy from an other. Difficulties with this process are caused either by a caretaker's frustration of the child's readiness to separate or by a premature thrust into independence. A child who does not separate adequately remains symbiotically attached to the other, habitually looking outside rather than within for approval. It is the intense dependence on recognition that makes the identity of this protagonist so vulnerable and it is this attribute which is brought (and to some degree, lured) into the social movement arena.

Despite the psychoanalytic origins of identity vulnerability, the construct of agency is not one which stresses the impact of individual psychology on social structure. Rather, it emphasizes a "rebound" effect: the impact of structural dynamics on the individual due to the nature of psychological predispositions. In contrast to the classical social psychological theories of collective action which view the irrational and destructive outcomes of social movements as a function of the blemished personalities of individual participants, the concept of the identity vulnerable activist suggests that destructive and irrational outcomes are determined by two concomitant factors: (1) psychic repression -- the activist's shame and denial regarding her regressed need for recognition -- and (2) the subsequent exploitation of the activist's unconscious, intentionally or otherwise, by external forces.

Thus, it is the interaction between the protagonists unconscious and the historical forces shaping the movement, including the Establishment, the media, other activists and the state, that created the irrational actor: the New Left activist of the 1960s who, fifteen years later, holds up a House 0' Weenies and calls it armed struggle or the one who sings the Puerto Rican National Anthem as she is being sentenced to 120 years in prison.

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Notes

*: Earlier drafts of this paper formerly titled, "The Baddest Social Movement" were presented at the NEH Summer Seminar at Cornell University in 1992 and at the American Sociological Association Annual Meetings in 1993. The author wishes to thank Karen Beckwith, Alberto Melucci, David Meyer, Sidney Tarrow, Verta Taylor and David wright for their comments on the first draft. Special thanks to Jeff Goodwin, Charles Tilly, Joshua Freeman and Stephen Duncombe for their contributions to the current manuscript. Back.

Note 1: In the United States very little has been written about these groups beyond journalists' accounts of arrests and trials and studies by experts in "terrorist studies," a recently established subfield of criminology which focuses primarily on law enforcement issues and strategies for deterrence. See for instance the publication, Terrorism: An International Journal (1976 to present). Back.

Note 2: It is worth noting that although Melucci's initial article on collective identity and Italian terrorism is published in 1981, the Tarrow/della Porta study, published in 1986, makes no reference to this work. This omission reflects the marginality of his work in relation to the dominant paradigm in the field at that time. Back.

Note 3: The seminal texts on object relations theory which provided the foundation for Chodorow's and Benjamin's work are Harry Guntrip, Personality Structure and Human Interaction (1961) and D.W. Winnicott, The Maturational Process and the Facilitating Environment (1965). Back.

Note 4: Articles based on this research have been published in Qualitative Sociology, Social Justice, Social Movement Research, and Feminist Review. I expect to complete a book manuscript in 1996 entitled Mothering on the Lam (Basic). Back.

Note 5: I wish to acknowledge the contribution that Lynn Chancer's Sadomasochism in Everyday Life (Rutgers University Press, 1992) made to my understanding of the state's motivations in relation to the repression of social protest movements. Back.

Note 6: In contrast to the Marxist-Leninist, Trotskyist and Maoist groups that formed during the decline and became increasingly sectarian and rigidified in their ideological beliefs, the emotive -action frame underlying the armed struggle diminishes the role of ideology in this tendency of the movement. Back.

Note 7: I am not proposing that this concept of agency is new to the theoretical landscape in general, only that it represents a new formulation within the social movement paradigm. Back.